What kneeling on a department store floor taught me about gratitude
As regular readers know, I am a gratitude ignoramus. This concept that flows so easily through the lives of others never fails to leave me confounded; I stand around scratching my head and analyzing what it means to count your blessings, while other people are actually counting their blessings.
Ann Voskamp (whose blog I’m pretty sure the Bible specifically commands us to read) was the first person to get me thinking about this concept. I would read through her 1,000 Gifts posts and feel the Holy Spirit pouring through my computer screen, beckoning me to adopt the same outlook in my own life. One time I was wiping tears out of my eyes after reading her poetic words of gratitude for all the good things in her life, and I resolved that I would do the same — starting now. I had to go to the grocery store, which seemed like the perfect place to start naming the good things that surround me.
Alas, it only took about three minutes for the whole thing to go off the rails. I arrived at the grocery store entrance, and paused in front of the door to think:
Lord, I am thankful for these automatic sliding doors, which make it so easy to enter this place of abundance! So, I guess you could say I am thankful for the machine that actually slides the door open. And that little laser eye thing that senses movement, which I think is a separate mechanism. So, really, I am thankful for all the engineers of the world, who create such devices. And the manufacturing facilities. Which is not to say that I’m not also grateful to the people who make the glass that not only forms the door but allows us to see into the store! And the people who designed the metal frame that holds it, the miners who mined the materials…
You think I’m kidding.
The people behind me didn’t seem to be feeling particularly thankful as I blocked the entrance with my gratitude paralysis, so I moved inside the store, assuring God that I was thankful for the sign on the door displaying the hours and the paint used to make it, even though I had not specifically mentioned them. Seeing as how I didn’t have a week to complete this store trip, I decided to stop analyzing my physical surroundings and just make a list of things that I had felt particularly grateful for lately. The first few items were:
- Liquor store gift cards
- Earl Campbell sausage
- Techno remixes of rap songs
I was about to add bacon and boxed wine to the list, until it occurred to me that that would leave me with a gratitude list in which 80% of the items were related to alcohol or pork products. Clearly, this exercise was not going to yield the results I had hoped for. So I gave up once again, resigning myself to the occasional thought of, “Hey, thanks!” thrown out in God’s general direction.
Meanwhile, I’ve been having this issue with debilitating stabbing pains in my lower abdomen. The good news is that an emergency room trip that included CAT scans, bloodwork and physical exams showed that I’m the very picture of good health. The bad news is that, umm, I keep having these random, debilitating stabbing pains in my lower abdomen. (As if I’m not socially awkward enough, now I occasionally lean over in agony during polite conversation, grunting out, “It’s cool…The doctor says…I’m…fine…!”) I’m going to continue to seek answers from medical professionals and Dr. Google, but, at least for the short term, I’m stuck with it.
Earlier this week I was at the store Kohl’s with one of my daughters. We were having a great time, trying on clothes, even finding some great sales…and then it hit me. We were walking by the purses section when the familiar red-hot stabbing pain started up again. I’d been worried about this happening in public, and now my fear had come true. This was a particularly bad episode, and it caused me to drop to my knees. To keep from attracting attention to myself, I pretended to take a closer look at the purses on the bottom shelf. It was infuriating. I was trying to do something utterly simple like do a little shopping, and now it had been derailed by this stupid issue over which I evidently have no control.
My daughter knelt down next to me and whispered, “Are you okay?”
I said I was. And when I looked over at her, I thought, Well, at least she’s here with me.
And for whatever reason, that simple thought changed everything. It triggered a cascade of grace, and suddenly, my entire perspective shifted.
…This song they’re playing as background music is actually one of my favorites, was the next thought. And then: How perfect that I happened to be by the purses, so I’d have a good excuse for being on the floor. What a blessing that my mom was able to keep the baby; that it’s me in discomfort instead of my daughter; and that these pains usually don’t last for more than 30 seconds anyway.
Another surge of pain hit, and I made a grunting noise as I dropped the purse I’d been holding. I couldn’t help but smile as it occurred to me that it looked to people passing by like I was having an angrily primal reaction to handbags without exterior pockets. This prompted another round of thoughts of thanksgiving: Thank God for little girls who love to shop with their mommies. For the ER technology that ruled out worries of serious issues. For purses, which help me in my vocation. For living in a land of such abundance that stores like Kohl’s exist. For the fact that I’m even alive to feel this pain at all! I started laughing in between winces, which prompted my daughter to giggle right alongside me.
In my normal mode of thinking, I would not have been able to see past the pain. I would have had a laser focus on my desire to shop without having to deal with this, and would have channeled all my thoughts to that end. But being forced into a moment of surrender prompted me to stop asking “What do I want?”, and looking into my four-year-old daughter’s eyes prompted me to ask instead, “What do I have?” In my previous attempts at gratitude, I wasn’t wrong for being thankful for Earl Campbell sausage and automatic doors at the grocery store — but that was more a generic list of good elements of the created world, rather than a joyful examination of the blessings God puts in my path to draw me closer to himself right here, right now.
There on the floor at Kohl’s, giggling behind a stand of purses with my daughter, I learned that gratitude is an acknowledgment of a relationship more than it is a dry list of goods. It’s a thank-you note for the stepping stones that God places in our paths to show us the way to heaven; a willful act of seeing the hand of God at work in our lives, even when our circumstances aren’t ideal.
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(And, while we’re talking about Ann Voskamp, grab a box of Kleenex and go read about what she’s doing in Ecuador, and prayerfully consider if you feel led to help her in this mission.)
Living an awesome story
A good nickname for me would be “Inertia,” because, like the dictionary definition of the word, I tend to “exist in a state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.”
If my choice is accepting an invitation to go to an interesting social event or continuing to sit in front of my computer, I’ll choose the latter. If I had an idea for a new way to decorate the living room, I wouldn’t do it, even if I had the time or money. In other words, left to my own devices, I tend to do nothing.
As usual, it almost always comes down to fear. I have this personality quirk where I’m always worried about doing the wrong thing and screwing something up, so I find it easier to avoid change, even if it means missing out on good opportunities. (This is also one of the reasons I have such trouble with decision making in general; if I order a cheeseburger at a restaurant, for example, I’m immediately plagued with the thought, WHAT IF I SHOULD HAVE ORDERED THE SHRIMP INSTEAD?!?! Yeah. It’s hard to be me.)
Anyway, I’ve had this tendency my whole life. But then, earlier this year I discovered a book. And everything changed.
It started when Brandon Vogt left this comment to my post asking for book recommendations. He raved about Donald Miller’s memoir A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, listing all the changes he and his family had made after Miller’s book had prompted them to wonder how they could turn their life into a great story (which now has included building a computer lab in Africa). Intrigued, I read the book.
It begins with Miller stuck in a funk after writing his smash bestseller, Blue Like Jazz. He’d written a couple of other books that didn’t do so well, and his life was at a standstill. Then he got a call from some producers who wanted to make a movie out of Blue Like Jazz; and since it was a memoir, that means they’d be making a movie of his life. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is the chronicle of what he learned in the process. Two guys named Steve and Ben came out to write the screenplay with him, and in one of the book’s first scenes, Steve mentions that they’ll need to take some liberties with his story in order to make it a good movie. Don asked why they couldn’t just use the facts of his real life. Steve replies:
Steve sat thoughtfully and collected his ideas. He scratched his chin and collected some sympathy. “In a pure story,” he said like a professor, “there is a purpose in every scene, in every line of dialogue. A movie is going somewhere.”
That last line rang in my ear like an accusation. I felt defensive, as though the scenes in my life weren’t going anywhere. I mean, I knew they weren’t going anywhere, but it didn’t seem okay for someone else to say it. I didn’t say anything; I tried to think about the philosophy of making movies so my face would look like I was thinking about something other than the fact that Steve didn’t think my life was going anywhere.
This prompted him to start asking: What does a great story look like? What would my life look like if it were an amazing story? He writes:
In creating the fictional Don, I was creating the person I wanted to be, the person worth telling stories about. It never occurred to me that I could re-create my own story, my real life story, but in an evolution I had moved toward a better me. I was creating someone I could live through, the person I’d be if I redrew the world, a character that was me but flesh and soul other. And flesh and soul better too.
He learns a lot about what it means to live a great story, but the lesson that most resonated with me was the one about fear. There’s never been an Academy Award winning movie about someone who lived his life cowering in fear, never taking action because he’s worried about messing something up.
The great stories go to the ones who don’t give in to fear.
The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is “Do not fear.” It’s in there over two hundred times. That means a couple of things, if you think about it. It means we are going to be afraid, and it means we shouldn’t let fear boss us around. Before I realized we were supposed to fight fear, I thought of fear as a subtle suggestion in our subconscious designed to keep us safe, or more important, keep us from getting humiliated. And I guess it serves that purpose. But fear isn’t only a guide to keep us safe; it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.
This was a profound insight for me. Reading of Don’s metamorphosis from couch potato to a risk-taking man of action inspired me to do the same in my own life. My decision-making flowchart used to begin with the question, Is there any risk involved? And if I could imagine the slightest thing that could go wrong, I usually wouldn’t do it. Now I begin with the question, Would it make a good story? And if the answer is yes, I usually do it.
Obviously, asking ourselves if it would make a good story is not the only litmus test we should use for decision-making. We need to consider if it’s prudent, if it’s God’s will, etc. And, as Brandon points out in one of his (excellent) posts on the book, we need to make sure we’re living our story with God, not seeing him as an uninterested editor. But incorporating that question into my thought process has changed my life. Stories inevitably contain both ups and downs, challenges as well as triumphs, and thinking of it this way has helped me get over my fear of making mistakes. Rather than thinking of a risk that didn’t pay off as the end of the world, I now see it as just another part of the story.
Don Miller rewrote his life story by searching for his father and asking a cute girl he barely knew to hike the Inca Trail with him in Peru. What would it look like for me, a suburban housewife with five young kids, to live a great story?
I’ve started saying yes to more social invitations. When I’m pretty sure God is calling me to do something, I just do it, without the usual detour down Overanalysis Lane that leads me to talk myself out of it. I’m less likely to decide to do something out of guilt alone, so I’m better at saying no when I need to. Ironically, it’s made me take myself less seriously (in a good way), since thinking of the events of my life as part of a grander story helps put them all in perspective.
What I learned from this book was to not let fear hold me back; to think big; to expand the scope of what I believe it’s possible for one person to accomplish. I’ve learned to put 100% of myself into every moment, and to let go of worries about whether everything will turn out perfectly.
At the end of the book, Miller talks about a great movie he once saw about a real football team. To his surprise, the screenwriters chose to cover the year they almost won the state championship game, rather than the year they did win it. The screenwriters understood that that year they lost was the better story, because that was the time the team had tried hardest and sacrificed most. As Miller points out: It’s not necessary to win for the story to be great; it’s only necessary to sacrifice everything.
6 Questions My Spiritual Director Would Ask
I’ve mentioned a few times that I had an amazing spiritual director named Christie. Unfortunately, she’s gotten busy with other commitments and I haven’t been able to meet with her lately, so I’ve been without a spiritual director for a while now. I hope to find a new person soon, but in the meantime I’ve been thinking back on my conversations with her, particularly when I’m trying to discern the right path for some big decision where there’s no clear right answer. When recalling our meetings, I realized that Christie almost always asked me the same few questions, and that prayerfully considering my answers to each one always helped get me off the fence and make a good choice. I thought it might be helpful to others to share what they were.
1. Have you prayed about it?
You would think that this question wouldn’t be necessary, but, alas, we’re dealing with me here, and Christie quickly learned that we might want to cover this base before moving on. With embarrassing frequency I’d come to her and pour out my angst about some conundrum, throw up my hands in frustration, and announce that God did not seem to be helping me here. Then she’d gently asked if I had prayed about it; specifically, if I had set aside the time not only to place my petition before God, but to calmly wait and listen for an answer. The answer was often “no,” which gave me an obvious place to start in my discernment process.
2. How does it impact your primary vocation?
I can’t overstate the importance of this question. It’s brought more peace to my life than any other thought exercise. The Catholic idea of vocation is that the meaning of life is to serve others, and your vocation (e.g. married life, religious life, priesthood, etc.) is the main way that God intends for you to serve. It’s his primary path for you to find peace and fulfillment — and, therefore, no legitimate call from God would negatively impact your vocation. For example, God would never call a parish priest to do something that made him feel burdened and resentful of offering the Mass on Sunday, he would never call a father to something that made him feel tied down and frustrated by his wife and kids, etc. It doesn’t mean that the only things you ever do are directly related to the duties of your vocation, simply that those duties are your top priority.
On many occasions I’ve started pursuing opportunities that seemed great in theory, but made my life as a wife and a mother harder. I would walk around the house snapping at everyone, feeling angry that I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to work on these projects, bemoaning the basic duties that come with my vocation, etc. Thanks to the advice from my spiritual director, I would take this to mean that this wasn’t where God wanted me. And, sure enough, every time I made changes that improved my ability to live out my vocation well, I’d find myself on a far better path that made me much happier (and, surprisingly, often led to more success with the project than when I was sitting around fixating on it to the exclusion of my family).
3. What does your spouse think?
Christie always reminded me that God often speaks through our spouses. I’ve experienced this many times myself but, like with #1, I’d often get so caught up analyzing something that I’d forget to sit down with my husband and get his thoughts. (For people who are not married, an alternative might be to ask your parents, siblings, or a trusted friend.)
4. Are you taking care of yourself?
One of the most interesting conversations we ever had was when I told Christie how terrible my prayer life had been lately, and her first questions were about how I was taking care of myself. Was I eating well? Sleeping enough? Getting some exercise? Upon further examination, it came out that I was running myself ragged: I was stuffing myself with junk food all day, spending too much time online, staying up way too late, never exercising, then pounding coffee to help me muddle through each day. She pointed out that while God certainly blesses us when we suffer (e.g. in the case of chronic illness), self-inflicted suffering is different. Basically, it would be like if I’d been sitting around and hitting myself repeatedly with a hammer, then crying, “I feel bad and never feel like praying! So weird!” After I improved my diet, got my relationship to the internet in check, and changed my views about exercise, not only did I feel 100% better physically, but I found that my spiritual life was much better as well.
5. Are you making decisions based on fear or anger?
The Holy Spirit does not bark at us in a voice of anger. He doesn’t instill us with fear. He doesn’t make us feel bad about ourselves. Yet too often, I found myself making decisions out of these kinds of feelings — thankfully, Christie was there to point out that this was not of God. For example, at one point I was discerning whether or not to homeschool, but so much of my thinking was fear-based: I was worried about something I’d heard about the local school, worried about how one of my kids would do in public school, but also sure that I was too lazy and incompetent to teach my children, terrified of messing up their educations, etc. I couldn’t even engage in a rational analysis of the pros and cons of each path because my thoughts were consumed with fear, fear, fear.
Christie encouraged me to let go of those feelings and make a conscious effort to trust that God would lead us down the best path for us, and that he’d bless whichever path that was. Once I did that, I was able to let go of all those fearful thoughts, which freed my mind to objectively look at what I thought would be best for our family, as well as to listen to God’s promptings. In the end we have ended up homeschooling after trying a couple other options, but this time I’ve had complete peace about it, because I was no longer letting angst and fear drive my decisions.
6. Which path would bring you the most peace?
Similar to the above, Christie would sometimes ask me to imagine myself going through each of the various options that were before me in some dilemma, and to consider which one would bring me the most peace. Fairly often, I would find that when I actually took the time to do this, one option made me feel filled with the peace of the Holy Spirit, whereas other options that might seem better on paper left me riddled with anxiety — and the peace-filled option always ended up being the right path.
Additional Resources
I usually get a lot of great questions when I bring up the subject of spiritual direction, so here are some additional resources:
- If you’d like to find a spiritual director or find out more about what spiritual direction is like, here’s a post I wrote about that.
- This spiritual direction blog is a wealth of information on discernment and the spiritual life. Definitely worth bookmarking and reading regularly.
- This post called 9 Things to Do When Needing Direction has some great tips on this topic.
No, son, the F-word actually won’t make your life better
My six-year-old son returned from Yaya‘s house on Monday to report a thrilling discovery: according to the older boys on her street, there is a really, really bad word that starts with F!
His eyes sparkled as he reported this most important of news. “They told me that there’s this horrible word, and it begins with F. I thought I knew what it was — fat – but they said that that wasn’t it. They said that this one is even worse!” He stared off into space for a moment, almost drooling at the prospect of obtaining this information, and added, “I have to find out what it is.”
He started ruminating about ways he could get the boys to divulge this information, but I interrupted him. “Just forget about it,” I said. “You can talk to the boys about other things, but I don’t want you to ask them about that one word.”
And thus began our own little Garden of Eden drama right there in the living room. The forbidden fruit had been identified by the powers-that-be, and the predictable results followed. My son immediately mistrusted my motives. The more he thought about it, the more the word seemed better and my intentions seemed worse. If he only had this knowledge, his eyes would be opened and he would gain wisdom! His life would be better! Why would his parent keep him from such goodness?
On her old blog, Simcha Fisher once wrote a post about how the knowledge that Adam and Eve gained from eating the forbidden fruit didn’t add anything to their lives. What they gained was sin, and sin always subtracts, never adds. I thought it was an interesting point, but it didn’t quite resonate with me. I was so thoroughly steeped in the worldview that all knowledge is good, that knowing more is always better, that I couldn’t quite understand the concept that some things are better left unknown.
But as I watched my son ponder this issue on Monday, I finally got it. Just like with the original forbidden fruit coveted by the world’s first son, my child was not missing out on anything by not having it, and it was out of love that I designated it forbidden. I can state unhesitatingly (and from a fair amount of personal experience) that the ability to drop an impassioned f-bomb really would not improve his life; in fact, it would make it a little worse. As I watched him sitting there, a ffffff sound escaping from his lips as he reviewed his vocabulary over and over again, it occurred to me that this is, and has always been, one of the most critical battles of the spiritual life: simply to trust our heavenly Parent when he tells us that some things we desire really won’t make our lives better.